About AhSo
If I told you I was eating potato skins and drinking a frozen cocktail in Ashburn, you might think I was slumming it, culinarily speaking.
Hardly. In fact, I’m sitting in a handsome, window-wrapped dining room. And the chef who has carefully fried those skins until they became feathery, then topped them with sous-vide chicken, mozzarella, and buttermilk dressing, is none other than Jason Maddens, former chef at Central Michel Richard in DC and managing partner/chef at Clarity, the esteemed Vienna bistro.
Snacks like those potatoes—plates that Maddens and his staff gorge on after a shift and that also include a goat-sausage corn dog—are among the top reasons to pay AhSo a visit. So are the cocktails, which include a minty bourbon-and-peach refresher and a gently spiced mai tai.
Maddens hasn’t abandoned his fine-dining roots, but you can tell he’s having more fun at this place of his own (it was all a dream, reads a neon sign by the open kitchen). An appetizer of tuna niçoise elevates the composed salad with a thinly sliced roulade of raw tuna, plus tomato confit and dabs of herbed aïoli and olive tapenade. A bed of grits shows off beautifully seared scallops ringed with chorizo and pickled fennel stalks. Less successful: underseasoned fried oysters, a play on Rockefeller.
Among the entrées, a duo of chicken shows off Maddens’s split personality. On one side of the plate is a perfectly roasted bone-in chicken breast, on the other a crunchy fried leg. A grilled bavette steak—as flavorful as flank—is nearly upstaged by a bowl of yuca that’s tossed, Mexican-street-corn-style, with aïoli and cotija cheese. Although a vegetarian play on spaghetti and meatballs is one of the few constants on the ever-changing menu (Maddens uses spaghetti squash and lentil-quinoa orbs in it), the riff lacked much verve. And desserts, such as a stale-tasting gluten-free brownie sundae, have tasted a bit phoned in.
Still, these kinds of restaurants—and this caliber of chef—have until now been in short supply in Ashburn. Maddens wanted to open a restaurant closer to his home, and he instantly fell for the Brambleton development and its town center. “Everyone who lives here has drunk the Kool-Aid,” he says of the neighborhood. “They all love it.”
Looking around the dining room on my last visit, I saw kids perched with iPads, friends lingering over wine, and folks pop-ping in for a bowl of the popular ramen the kitchen serves on Wednesday nights—plus a lot of full seats. Looks like Maddens has created exactly what the neighborhood needs.
AhSo
22855 Brambleton Plaza, Ashburn; 703-327-6600
Open Tuesday through Saturday for dinner, Sunday for brunch and dinner.
Expensive
This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Washingtonian.
Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
